The DOBlog

Category: Dell Hell

A category devoted to my analysis of the Information and Process quality issues in Dell computer from the point of a peeved customer

  • Dell Build Quality

    So, I’ve recently invested in a new laptop for work. I got it on Tuesday. Today I noticed that the “J” key on the keyboard had come loose. That’s after less than a week of average use in my home office. The laptop hasn’t been out on the road (yet) and as it is performing well I haven’t had to bash the keyboard in frustration at a 20 minute hang for no reason (like on my old laptop).

    It is probably an easy fix, but it does raise a question about the build quality on Dell laptops when one of the “home” keys for touch typing can come loose so easily.

    But it is just one key. Surely not a big thing? I suppose that is a valid view. But often quality and perception of quality hangs on how the small stuff works.

    • The hotel might be great, but there’s no coffee with the in-room tea and coffee facilities (I like to make a cup of very strong coffee first thing in the morning when travelling for work)
    • The flight might be fine, but the hot sandwich you wanted to order from the attendants wasn’t in stock
    • A broken keyboard stops you typing “jumping jeosophat”

    A while ago I wrote an article for the IAIDQ about the “long tail of risk”, or the long tail of quality. My basic premise in the article was that as you tackle the big issues of quality and risk in Information, the smaller issues become increasingly important, so there is increasing value to be found in the “long tail” of issues.

    That’s why “Zero Defects”, while in part a wonderful slogan, is in fact a valuable goal to set for Quality Management. Setting your sights lower means you are accepting inevitable mediocrity. Why do I say this? Well, simply because the common argument against zero defects is that it is unattainable as a goal (it’s not) and compromises need to be made (they often do). However, if you set your target at 99.9% defect free, you’ll still find compromises being made (“we’ll aim for 60% this quarter and increase again next quarter”) and fudges being introduced.

    I saw a great presentation a few weeks ago from a Clinical Quality lead from the UK NHS. He gave some great statistics as to what 99.999% quality means:

    • 6200 ATM errors per week in the UK
    • 18 fatal airline crashes per year, in the UK
    • 2 children given to the wrong parents every day, in the UK

    So. My faulty key might be one component out of 108 on the keyboard and many thousands in the laptop. But it being broken has soured my experience and reduced my perception of quality of the laptop as a whole. While it isn’t up there with a fatal airline crash, it does bug me.

    (As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Qantas are considering suing Rolls Royce for a minor defect in the engines of the A380 Airbus which lead to oil leakage and an engine fire. It’s only a small thing, but…)

  • Dell hell comes to an end…

    My Dell Hell has come to an end. The outcome is not entirely what I had hoped for, but at least the issue has been resolved and I understand what has beeng going on.

    Thanks to John who took the time to follow through and look at the information that I had posted on this blog about the graphics card that was installed in my laptop. I had ‘spoken with data’ by presenting a screen shot of the diagnositics utility for the graphics card. John took this information and responded in kind – he provided information to me that explained that what I was seeing in the graphics card diagnostics confirmed that the graphics card that was installed in my laptop now is the graphics card that I ordered.

    5 months of frustration on my part, half a dozen graphics cards sent to me by Dell and the root cause of the problem was a failure of the information provided about the graphics card to properly meet – or perhaps more accurately to properly set- my expectations as to the performance and capability of the graphics card.

    5 months of costs that could easily have been avoided if the information provided about the graphics card had been complete and timely.

    It transpires that the hypermemory technology used in the ATI graphics cards means that the card ships with 128mb dedicated video ram but it ‘borrows’ from the system memory as required, up to a maximum of 256MB. Unfortunately there is nothing in the laptop that shows this, leading to confusion. The bios registers 128mb, and the graphics card’s own diagnositics display 128MB with no mention of the ‘reserve tank’ that can be dipped into. There is no indication that the card has a greater capability in reserve.

    John found only one specific reference to this in the on-line documentation for the model of laptop. This was in a footnote. This is important information… it should perhaps have been put in a more prominent position in the documentation?

    In my email discussions with John on this topic we discussed various options that might be explored to improve the presentation of information about these types of graphics card technologies. He assured me he would bring them forward as suggestions to improve the customer experience for Dell customers. I hope he does so and some changes are implemented. The business case for doing this is simple.. it avoids support costs and increases customer satisfaction.

    My suggestions to John included:

    1. Information about how the cards work should be presented at point of sale. In particular information about what customers should expect to see in any diagnostics tools should be provided.
    2. The information about how ‘hypermemory’ type graphics technologies work should be promoted from a footnote to a more prominent position in on-line and print documentation.
    3. Dell should request (or even require) the manufacturers of these graphics cards to modify their diagnostic tools to display the on-board video RAM and the maximum capacity of the ‘reserve tank’ in system memory that can be utilised. I’ll discuss this last suggestion in a bit more detail in a moment.

    My suggestion regarding the change to the manufacturer’s own utilities would more accurately reflect the capabilities of the card and align what the utilities show and what the manufacturer (and by extension Dell) advertise the capacity of the card to be. This information could be displayed as follows:

    Dedicated Video Ram = 128MB
    Maximum Available System RAM = 128MB
    Maximum Graphics Memory Available= 256MB

    The maximum available system ram value could be hard-coded value based on the model of the card. This would allow a single software fix to address all models of graphics cards. The amended diagnostic control panels could be pushed to Dell customers as a software update. This is not a difficult fix and would quickly address the root cause of the issues at hand. If the diagnostic utility currently installed had shown a ‘memory audit’ like the one above I wouldn’t have raised the support issue in the first place and my blog would have been a quieter place for the last few months.

    By increasing the completeness of the information, the accuracy of it improves and the risk of consumers such as myself from raising support cases and pursuing issues which, ultimately, are a result of poor quality information leading to a failure in clear communication as to what the capability of the card is and what the purchaser’s expectation should be.

    Personally, I feel that this technology is a fudge and the way the information about the capability of the cards is presented by the manufacturers is misleading. I hope that Dell take this opportunity to implement simple changes to improve the quality of information.

    The business case for these changes can be determined easily by Dell based on the number of support cases raised, the length of time/amount of resources expended on investigating and dealing with these cases and the costs of any replacement cards shipped to customers. This is the cost of non-quality.

    The benefit to Dell of reducing the risk of confusion is the savings that would result through a reduction in these types of support calls. The return on investment would be straightforward to calculate from there, however based on my experience in information quality management I would suggest that the costs to Dell of the three remediation actions I have suggested would be far less than the costs of service issues arising simply from poor quality information.

    The Information Quality lessons that I would suggest people take from this saga:

    1. Poor Information Quality can impact all processes
    2. The actions that can be taken to prevent Information Quality problems are often simple, straightforward and easy to implement. The key factor is to focus on the customer and determine what steps need to be taken to ensure your processes and information are meeting or exceeding their expectations
    3. Speak with Data– when I posted the screen shot from the graphic card utility I provided information to Dell (and to the world) about what I was seeing and the basis on which I felt there was a problem. This then allowed John to validate what I was saying, and he responded in kind with detailed information (including links to wikipedia and the footnote in the on-line Dell documentation). This enabled clear, accurate and effective communication based the facts, not anecdote or hearsay and lead to me being happy to close the issue.

    I promised John I would eat some humble pie. I was wrong in my belief that the graphics card that was installed in my laptop was not the spec that was ordered. I am grateful to John and those in Dell who tried to resolve the issue.

    However the fact that the issue arose in the first place has at its root the quality of information about the graphics card and its capability. The fact that the issue dragged on for 5 months is, in part, due to the fact that it seemed that there was a lack of information within some areas of Dell about what the capability of the card was and what the situation actually was and a failure to effectively communicate this.

    And John’s explanation doesn’t address why the first replacement card that was shipped to me for my laptop was a graphics card for a desktop…

    ….that still makes me chuckle in bemusement.

  • Dell Quality Happy path

    Good news

    Keyboard arrived today (July 30th) just before 13:00. Spent lunch swapping out keyboard. Can now type Quality again without pausing….

    ….received phone call at 14:00 from Dell tech support to confirm that I’d received the keyboard and that I’d been able to swap it over without difficulty.

    Excellent ‘within-warranty’ customer service – my only issue is with their on-line form and the processes that support it which changed my name and required me to re-enter a lot of information Dell would (should?) already have about me.

    Bad news

    The question I’m left with now is why has it taken Dell 5 months to address the other more substantive issue, the one where the laptop wasn’t built to specification and they have not yet remedied that situation?

    The time and cost clock on this instance of non-quality is still ticking. The number of Dell staffers I’ve dealt with is still growing. The root cause of this whole issue is an information quality problem which could easily be avoided. Ergo, the costs involved and time-hassles involved could have been avoided if the relevant information process had functioned correctly and, failing that, if the corrective processes had operated efficiently.

    On the subject of Information Quality, I’ve attached a copy of the article Common Law and IQ Governance. It’s a break from a series I’m writing based on my experiences with Dell with regard to my graphics card. I’ll be presenting on this and related legal topics in Information Quality (or should that be related information quality topics in law?) at both the IDQ Conference and the IRM UK Conference and will most likely be using this whole issue as a case study, highlighting the various legal issues that it raises (compliance with EU Distance Selling Regulations, Data Protection, Contract Law, Negligence etc.). To read the rest of the articles in this Quarter’s IAIDQ newsletter go to http://www.iaidq.org and join the IAIDQ (if you aren’t already a member).

    As I have had no further substantive contact from Dell (John was well meaning but nothing seems to have come of it) and as it is over a month since graphics card number 5 was supposed to have been sent to me I’ll be meeting my legal advisors this week to discuss next steps.

  • Dell Hell Ireland (and other flavours) on Google

    So for shits and giggles I decided to google Dell Hell and Ireland. (The wife is out for the night, I’m bored, it seemed like a good idea at the time).

    http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLF_en-GBIE226IE228&q=dell+hell+ireland

    To increase the sample size, I removed the reference to “Ireland” and instead googled for “Dell Hell Information Quality”… frack me, there I am again – the top 2 (tonight, 27 July 07).

    http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLF_en-GBIE226IE228&q=dell+hell+information+quality

    So to be fair to Dell I removed the reference to “hell” to see how the DoBlog might fare with the Great Search Algorithm in the sky. This was a ‘positive control’. Wasn’t I pleasantly surprised when I was again the top 2 listed links on this day…

    http://www.google.ie/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLF_en-GBIE226IE228&q=dell+information+quality

    Not yet in Damien Mulley/SkyHandling Partners/”the server cannae take it Captain, she’s goin’ te blow” territory one can always dream…

    I googled a few other combinations… for “Dell quality Information” I was results 3 and 4 out of 16,800,000. That was a very neutral query. Still other combinations were picked but I can’t be bothered typing them … the screenshots below will show you the story.

    What I learned is that I am missing a very important tag from these posts… “Dell Quality”. That will be fixed tonight.

    Also by googling for Dell Quality and Ireland I found this pdf of a Dell presentation. I was interested to read this quote from Michael Hammer (Business Process Re-engineering guru) towards the end of the slides… I’ve highlighted a few words that leapt out at me.

    “ The 21st Century Belongs to the
    Process Organization Centered on
    Customers     and…Operates With
    High Quality    , Enormous Flexibility,
    Low Cost, and Extraordinary Speed.”

    With regards to my broken keyboard Dell are hitting the marks on this one. Quickly dealt with, within the agreed time period – the failure of the delivery is down to me… (sorry Dell, I’ll sort it out as soon as I can).

    My Graphics card issue however is a result of a failed process (assembly) as a result of poor quality information (either the assembler didn’t know to put in a 256mb card or couldn’t tell a 128mb card from a 256mb card) which has dragged on now for five months (which is extraordinary speed, just not in a good way). The fact that the issue still isn’t resolved and I’ve got a second ‘Customer Advocate’ from Round Rock Texas on the case now is indicative of how wide of their goals Dell are.

    (A big shout out to Rick and John… hope you guys are reading this as you reached out and I believe you have done your best to help with my situation. Elizabeth in Dublin… if you are back in the office could you PLEASE respond to the last few emails I’ve sent you as they are quite important… the email address you gave for the person who was covering for you kept bouncing back.)

    Joseph Juran, the Quality Management guru put it very well:

    “They thought they could make the right speeches, establish broad goals, and leave everything else to subordinates… They didn’t realize that fixing quality meant fixing whole companies, a task that cannot be delegated.”

    Joseph M. Juran, “Made in the USA: A Renaissance in Quality”, Harvard Business Review, July 1, 1993

    Deming’s Point 10 tells us “Eliminate slogans, exhortations and numerical targets for the workforce since they are divisory. The difficulties belong to the whole system”.

    Firefighting does not improve quality, especially when the fire is let smoulder on for nearly half a year (and a whole new product launch).

    Dell Information Quality search results

    Dell quality Ireland

    Dell quality information

    Dell Hell Ireland

    I have others but I can’t be bothered to put them up… I think my point is made.

    Perhaps Dell should consider getting in contact with the knowledgable practitioners in the International Association for Information and Data Quality (www.iaidq.org) who might be able to share some pointers on how to address the root causes of this problem.

  • Dell Hell… but not mine, but perhaps a different circle of the same techno hell

    The other guy’s story

    Came across this on Tom Raftery’s blog. Looks like Tom’s guest writer Frank P had ‘issues’ with Dell when trying to buy some kit off them. A barrier had been created that prevented him from buying a machine from the UK Dell outlet store simply (it would seem) because the UK uses sterling and the Irish Republic uses the Euro.

    This does not seem to be a problem for Marks and Spencer, who will happily charge my credit card in Euros or Sterling when I am buying bits and bobs when on trips to London. Nor do the people in the UK I’ve bought stuff from (including a laptop and spares for my guitar) on ebay have any problems selling to the Republic of Ireland just because we use Euros… they let paypal sort the currency conversion for them and whammo the wifey has a new toy and I can get back to trying to hammer a few tunes out of my much abused fender strat.

    Quality is about meeting or exceeding customer expectations. Deming advises us in his 14 Points to ‘break down barriers between departments’. To meet FrankP’s request, Dell could have simply charged him a slightly higher fee to cover currency conversion costs and transport from the UK (chances are the machine is in a warehouse in Ireland though…). Bingo- one sale, one happy customer. The barrier might have more to do with internal accounting for products by the market they are sold to… but that is a supposition on my part.

    The economics of this ‘non-quality’

    If I’m right, that is just crazy and is an excellent example of how ‘stovepiped’ management of ‘battling business units’ is a fricking recipe for disaster in most businesses and how such artificial barriers to delivery of quality products or service should be torn down.

    It’s like having a football team with defenders who won’t pass the ball to their strikers who are in the box with a clear shot on goal and the keeper off his line just because the strikers are paid in Euros while the defenders get their cheques in sterling. (Jaysus, I think that was a football metaphor.. not sure what it means or if it makes sense but it reads well).

    If you have ‘seconds’ stock or ‘returns’ you have inventory on hand. That costs money to store and if not sold costs money to dispose of. The longer it is stock on hand (in a warehouse gathering dust) the faster the resale price is dropping (due to obsolescence and the entry of newer/better products into the market at the original price point) and the less likely you are to recoup the cost of production, cost of storage and other related costs. Eventually the inventory becomes ‘below-zero’ in that it will have cost you more than you’ll make by selling it… resulting in declining profit margins.

    In order to reduce the costs to your business you should really be trying to sell that fecker to anyone (within the bounds of the law) who comes knocking/calling/writing as soon as possible without putting seemingly petty administrative barriers in the way. Doing so results in a business process that does not meet the expectation of the customer and as such is not a process that delivers ‘quality’. Furthermore it creates a risk of negative profit margins in the business.

    Instead Dell got a blog post on a highly trafficked blog (Tom Raferty’s)written by a respected professional pundit on the IT industry and Web2.0 trends (not an amateur by any stretch) where through various comments the customer service issue is discussed at length. And then that post is in turn linked to by me, with my particular perpsective on the issue.

    And for all we know the laptop still sits unsold in its cold warehouse shelf, unloved and spurned by the new Vostros and Inspirons that swank by with their swish coloured lids and ‘more bang for your buck’ specifications. Stick a red nose on that laptop and call it Rudolph. It won’t be let join in any laptop games I can tell you.

    My saga continues

    I have had and continue to have my issues with Dell. Currently I’ve been dealing with John, one of their Customer Advocates, Elizabeth (a Dell Ireland person) and half a dozen others over the past 5 months. At this rate I’ll probably have spoken to more Dell employees than Michael Dell himself by the end of the year.

    To cap things off (no pun intended), the ‘Q’ key on my keyboard broke off on Tuesday (too much angry typing of ‘Quality’ I fear and the end of my career as a ghost-writer for James Bond novels unless I do some business re-organisation of MI6 or cut back on the gadgets).

    HAPPY NEWS

    I contacted Dell support and was dealt with promptly. I was informed I’d have the keyboard today. I arranged to work from home to be available to take delivery here. Unfortunately I missed the call from the courier and will need to try to rearrange delivery (hopefully I can get it tomorrow rather than having to work from home Monday as well).

    Crappy News

    This is the GOOD NEWS. The BAD news is that some strange things happened to my information as it bounced around Dell Customer Support. For one, they changed my name.

    Here is the email I received yesterday informing me of delivery:

    Dear Mr. Brien,

    Thank you for your reply.

    Your call has been logged, and your reference number is [edited out by me]. Keyboard will be with you on next business day, between 09.00 and 17.30 (or other local working hours). If you are office based then please advises your reception of the expected Courier visit. You will be contacted in the event of any unforeseen delays.

    Thank you for giving me the opportunity to assist you. Your case number for this interaction is [edited out by me].

    Thank you again for contacting Dell Hardware E-Support.

    “BRIEN” That’s not my name. That annoys me. That’s not good information quality. Why not?

    Well, Dell’s on-line Tech Support form looks like this (once you key in the asset tag that identifies your machine)

    Dell’s Support Site

    I’ve blocked out the asset tag for my machine (for privacy) and you’ll need to click on the thumnail to see the full image but you’ll need to for the rest of this to make sense…
    Note the first two mandatory fields:

    • First Name
    • Last Name

    I won’t go into why this is a bad labelling convention that is Anglo-centric (Given Name/Family Name are better)… for now it is enought that Dell’s form has distinct fields for my Firstname (given name): DARAGH and my Lastname (Family Name): O Brien. That’s what got typed in there. So why/how did Dell decide that the “O” in my name was surplus to requirements?

    Attention to the little details (like getting my name right or ensuring that my laptop ships with the correct graphics card installed) are evidence of a coherent and congruent quality culture. Soundbites, slogans and self-contratulatory marketing materials don’t build such a culture. The IAIDQ is a professional organisation that exists to support the development of ‘Information/Data Quality’ as a management discipline. Their website is www.iaidq.org and Dell employees (or anyone for that matter) will find some useful information there about the root causes and real impacts of these types of problems

    But back to the happy path

    That said… the tech support guy Guaran was great in sorting out the replacement keyboard and I am kicking myself I missed the couriers call when it came bang on schedule.. when you’re good you’re good.

  • Dell Hell – a slight return

    It was announced yesterday that Dell are cutting 100 jobs in Ireland. Hmmmm…

    Dell is a company in trouble that is desperately trying to reinvent itself. However, my experience is that Dell is a company that is also deluding itself and incurring potentially large amounts of avoidable costs through poor management of processes and poor information quality.

    Regular site visitors may remember my “Dell Hell” posts. I haven’t posted much on this recently, which may give the impression that this issue has been resolved.

    Has it f**k. 5 months after I took delivery of the laptop Dell still have not completed manufacturing it to the specification I ordered. I am dealing with a single named person in Dell at this stage. 4 weeks ago I spoke to her and she undertook to send an other graphics card to me. She then emailed confirmation that she had done this to my work email address (which I’d specifically asked not be used).

    4 weeks (and 2 emails from me) later I haven’t had an acknowledgement or confirmation that anything is happening and I still don’t have the laptop I ordered and am paying for. This is NOT rocket science but Dell can’t get it right.

    To date I estimate that on a €1500 laptop Dell have spent the best part of €1000 to not fix my problem and continue to piss me off. If we assume that the laptop cost Dell €1000 to assemble & sell in the first place (assumes a 10% markup on the ex-VAT price) then Dell have LOST €500 (50% of cost of sales) on me as a customer.

    50% of cost of sales. That’s a lot isn’t it. And all as a result of poor quality information and poor quality process management.

    For my part I’ve gotten a few articles out of this and a few blog posts…

    Articles:

    Silver linings I have… all they’re seeing in Dell right now are clouds.

    50% of cost of sales… f**k me – if I had a business doing that badly I’d fold my tent and bugger off as well.

    +++Update+++
    Via The Register I found this story about Dell’s new moves to reinvent itself. Reading down through it I found the following quote. Apparently Dell…

    “..expect to ship customers a complete product. We’re not going to finish off products at customer sites with our services business.”

    Whaddefook? Why then am I still waiting for a techie to come and finish building my consumer Inspiron laptop (at my premises)? I would have expected that it would have been built to spec in the factory…

  • For the avoidance of doubt…

    The first bit of doubt

    Various Dell representatives have explained to me my problem as being one of how my graphics card uses hypermemory. However that doesn’t resolve the issue that I the option I selected when building my machine was for a card with 256MB dedicated video RAM – the fact that it could use hypermemory to extend that further was irrelevant.

    Screenshot of my graphics card properties.

    For the avoidance of doubt I’ve uploaded a screenshot of the properties of the graphics card from the ATI administration utility. Maybe I’m reading it wrong but it sure looks like a 128MB graphics card to me, hypermemory or no hypermemory.

    The other bit of doubt

    As some of you may know, I do the odd bit of teaching and guest lecturing at a university in Dublin City (rearrange the words to figure out which one). There’s another member of staff there who, lucky person that he is, shares a variant of my name. By variant I mean that the name is phonetically and aurally identical but there are a few small differences.

    • Dr. Darragh O’Brien uses his title (hard earned and well deserved) which is a title I don’t have (I’m just a pretender at this whole ‘knowing academic things’ it would seem).
    • Dr. Darragh spells his name with 2 ‘r’s. I don’t.
    • He uses an apostrophe in his surname (O‘Brien) where as I don’t)

    This is important as Dell just emailed him and phoned him trying to get in contact with me. The waves of surrealism are lapping harshly on the shores of my patience at this stage. Thankfully Dr. D (as I will refer to him to avoid confusion) forwarded me the email he got which I’ve responded to. He’s used to it – the Admin team in the particular faculty had him listed to teach my class for a while on the on-line course tools.

    I’m am heartily impressed that Dell went to the trouble of going to the university website and looking up contact details for me… I mean him… I mean me… …. drat, now even I’m confused. Particularly as they already had my personal email address in the email correspondence I’ve had and associated with my order and the support cases I’ve raised.

    All of which made me decide to dig out an old slide I use in presentations on Information Quality that shows why I got interested in the issue in the first place.
    Why i got into information quality

    For those of you who can’t use the powerpoint viewer here, I’ve converted the slide to a gif for your viewing pleasure.
    Why I got into IQ slide gif

    Dr. D — If you’re reading this thanks for the email forward and I hope you find my slide ‘amusing’.

  • What the Dell… an actual response… from a human!!

    What are the odds?

    In the week that scientists tell us they have discovered a planet that might support alien life, I got a response from a live person in Dell. And not in their off-shored outsourced Call Centre neither… this one was from ‘Dell Central’. Rick (for that is his name) reached out to me from Round Rock Texas as that is his job – he is part of an Internet Outreach team. I’m impressed – it took 3 days for Rick to respond to me but I’m still waiting for Samuel (the phone support supervisor I eventually got to speak to last week) to get back to me after a week.

    They never write, they never call… don’t they love me anymore? 🙁

    Also, there is the small matter that Dell have not responded to my “Unresolved Issue” report (via Dell Support on-line) which was raised on the 13th of April – that’s 13 elapsed days… If I hadn’t heard from Rick I’d have started to think they just didn’t care, that they had my money and that was all that mattered. But Rick has, thus far, restored my faith somewhat. At least he was proactive in reaching out to me.

    Dell Wars Part IV – A New Hope (?)

    I’ve taken Rick up on his invitation to contact him about my issues. Hopefully he’ll have read the various blog posts here under Dell Hell and will be up to speed on the issues I’m having. I’ll keep my readers posted on how this Soap Opera plays out… of course, a soap opera is usually a work of fiction – this is a painful case of fact.

  • Another example of Dell not connecting the dots

    The Register has this story about a fault in Dell Laptops.

    What is interesting about the problem is that it seems to expose some ‘failures’ in the passing of information internally within Dell, not least about their Direct2Dell website.

    Some interesting comments are made about UK trading standards. I’m hoping to have a post up soon analysing the legal aspects of my (on-going and still unresolved) issues with Dell.

  • Ding Dong Dell

    Deary me. Life with Dell just gets better and better. Not 2 hours after I finish writing up my experiences for the IAIDQ Q2 Newsletter then I find myself on the phone to a nice guy from Dell who is asking me about my DVD drive issues (phone call at 15:25 today approx).

    I had a feeling of dé ja vú, partly because I spoke to the same guy (or a sound-alike colleague) last Tuesday about that issue and agreed that it was resolved to my satisfaction. On Tuesday I tried to get a word in about my ongoing graphics card issue but was politely told to ‘send a email’.

    Today however I was transferred to the supervisor, whose name I took to be Samuel. Nice guy. very focussed on finding out my issues. He went into some detail explaining how ATI graphics cards take additional memory from the main system RAM as required so while it might be 128MB it can take extra from the system… then he realised I’d ordered 256MB dedicated video RAM and he became even more helpful and looked into it further.

    45 seconds later he came back to me to confirm that Customer Service had sent me a 128MB graphics card in error and that he would follow up and take care of it and would call me back on Monday.

    Now… what could be the root cause for someone in a call centre selecting the wrong thing from a list? Could it be that the systems and processes that exist for Dell service are not supportive of the staff’s best efforts to do their job right? If the system relies on a pick list or an alphabetic search then it is possible that this is a source of error in the process.

    All I know is that I have yet to talk to a Customer Service rep in Dell who sounds like they have a lot of pride in their work anymore. Samuel was the exception in recent times. Lucy (the tech support person I dealt with on day 1 about my DVD issues) was bright and perky but as a former call centre jockey myself I could sense an underlying tone of “we’ve been dropped in it again, why do I bother”.

    My experience is that Dell Customer service staff are all nice people who are trying to do the best job they can under pressure. I’ve been there myself as a call centre agent and supervisor – I know how it feels when the sytems don’t work, the data is wrong and the customer is furious at you – the representative of the behemoth. It is not a nice place to be in and it makes it hard to take pride in your work and be proud of who you work for. As a result, when you do spot the easy idea to help make things better you think “why should I bother? management don’t”

    My experience of errors and cockups from Dell suggests that the systems and processes that these people have to support them are letting them down. Poor quality processes, poor quality information and an increasing worry about the bottom line and profitability all weighs heavily on morale and pride. More importantly it drains money out of the organisation.

    I look forward to Monday. I may be naive but I am putting my trust in Samuel to follow through on his promise to sort this problem out. He sounded a bit shocked when he came back after looking at my customer service history. If they get it right this time then I might refrain from putting all of this into a conference presentation on the costs and impacts of poor Information Quality.

    Then again, maybe not. I could fill 3 hours at this stage.

    Current estimated cost of rework to deliver the laptop I ordered (ignoring warranty replacement of a defective dvd drive) is approx 44% of the purchase price of the laptop. No wonder margins are slipping in Dell.